Windows 7 is a great OS, hands down it’s the best I’ve ever used and to date I’ve had no problems with it, until now…… For some reason beyond me, every so often my laptop decides to be stubborn and just refuses to auto-refresh the desktop.
Now what do I mean by this? Well say I have a folder on my desktop, I delete it, but it remains there. The folder itself is actually deleted, but the folder icon is still there. It’s the same story when I go into my documents when I rename files or add new ones etc… it does actually change, but you can’t see the change.
This has really been irritating me as of late and in the past I had to do a full restart to fix the problem. After scouring the web to see if there was a solution for this, and finding nothing but dead ends, i’ve decided to develop my own solution.
What it involves is stopping the “explorer.exe” process, and then restarting it again.
Before I go into how to do this, can I just point out that this isn’t a permanent solution, it just prevents you from doing a full restart to fix it when it happens.
So first off we need to kill the explorer.exe process, now this can be done via the task manager, or what I like to do is the following
1. Open the start menu
2. Hold down
Shift and Ctrl3.
Right click on a blank area of the taskbar
4. A new window will pop up, then select
exit explorer
Now this will kill the explorer.exe process and you will see your taskbar disappear, don’t panic, it will be back in a minute.
Now to restart it we need to access the task manager by going
Ctrl+Alt+DeleteNext go to
File ->
New Task and then enter
explorer.exe into the box that appears and hit enter.
You’re explorer.exe process will then start up again and you will have your taskbar back and with a bit of luck your desktop is back to auto-refreshing as normal.
